Holy Week with C.S. Lewis

Spring is almost here; you can feel it in the air. In my backyard I see the tulips and crocuses eagerly groaning with expectation. Before you know it, summer will be around the corner. Time for vacation. Kick the tires. Load up the car. Hit the lights. Shut the door. Head for the hills. And don’t forget the kids. Because every five minutes for the next 8 hours you know that all you’ll hear is, “Are we there yet?”

In a way, Holy Week is like a family road-trip. You’ve been on the road for 40 days. Ash Wednesday feels like ages ago; you’re hungry from Lenten fast and ready for the Easter feast. You’re road-weary and ready to go home. It’s the home stretch. The whole church year has been one big procession, pointing us to the pilgrimage of the Christian life: a journey from Baptism to the grave, sustained by Christ’s Supper, and looking forward to the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.

C.S. Lewis was no stranger to a good sojourn. His usual method of transportation wasn’t a family station wagon, however. Lewis preferred to take walking tours of the countryside, often with his good friends, staying at inns along the way, and enjoying the God’s gifts of friendship, food, a warm fire, and good conversation. Again, Lewis’s enjoyment of the journey is a good way to remember this season of Lent as we walk ever closer to Holy Week.

If the season of Lent is a journey, Holy Week is the destination. The donkey and her colt, the palm branches and hosannas all give way to the mystery and holiness of Jesus’ Passover with his disciples, the shouts of “Crucify him; crucify him!” and Jesus’ own journey to the cross.

Lewis’s words are a helpful guide to our meditation on the terminus of our journey which is of course the saving work of Christ crucified and risen for you.

Maundy Thursday

In his book, Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer, Lewis wrestles with understanding the language of the Lord's Supper. He is imprecise and vague, yet honest at the same time. It’s worth remembering that Lewis never claimed to be a theologian. At times, his open disclaimer shows as he struggles to find the right word, explanation, or understanding of theology. And yet while Lewis doesn’t give the reader a full sacramental theology in Letters to Malcom, he does give the reader something helpful when approaching the Lord’s Supper concerning the mysterious and gracious center of Maundy Thursday.

Sometimes the simplest words are the best explanation. Lewis says that in his words of institution, Jesus gives us his divine hand of "strong magic.” Jesus says exactly what he means to say and gives what he means to give: “this is my body...this is my blood given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.” Rather than look for a purely logical explanation to Jesus’ words in giving the Lord’s Supper to his disciples and the Church, Lewis rests his thinking and faith in the clear and simple words of Jesus while at the same time confessing the mystery of what Jesus is saying, giving, and doing in the Lord’s Supper. How can ordinary bread and wine be Jesus’ body and blood? Faith simply clings to Jesus’ words that say this bread is his body and this cup of wine is his blood for our forgiveness; faith clings to the promise while confessing the mystery that here in the Lord’s Supper, we receive heaven on earth. And while we may not be able to fully understand, as Lewis observes, we take Jesus at his word:

I find no difficulty in believing that the veil between the worlds, nowhere else (for me) so opaque to the intellect, is nowhere else so thin and permeable to divine operation. Here a hand from the hidden country touches not only my soul but my body. Here the prig, the don, the modern, in me have no privilege over the savage or the child. Here is big medicine and strong magic...the command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand (Letters to Malcom).

Good Friday

For many, Good Friday is a day of sorrow. I remember the whole range of emotions expressed by movie goers as they watched Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ. It’s understandable; Good Friday encompasses deep joy and poignant sorrow. It is the place where Jesus’ glory and humility are revealed for all to see. Good Friday is how Jesus loves you; he goes to the cross for you. God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only begotten Son to save you. 

Good Friday is how Jesus loves you; he goes to the cross for you.

There on the cross is the very definition of love. Love incarnate. Love lived. Love Crucified. Love Resurrected. On Good Friday, Christ says to all sinners: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways: I was born; I grew in wisdom and knowledge as you did; I learned the Scriptures from my parents; I walked in your shoes - in the very soles of your own flesh; I know your pain; I know your disease; I know your temptation - even greater than you can imagine; I know your sin and most of all, today, I know your death. But that is not all I know about you. I know that you are loved, unendingly. And for you I go to create and fill the very word love with my own flesh and blood.” This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4). Lewis echoes this in his description of Good Friday:

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing - or should we say 'seeing'? there are no tenses in God - the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is 'host' who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and 'take advantage of' Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves (The Four Loves).

Holy Saturday 

Growing up, I remember some folks calling Holy Saturday “sad Saturday.” There certainly was sadness that first Holy Saturday as Jesus rested from all his labors in the tomb on the seventh day. And yet, for us who know, receive, and rejoice in the joyful ending of the story, Holy Saturday is also a day brimming with eager expectation. We groan with the fallen creation awaiting the new creation that our Lord ushers in by his dying and rising. It is, in a word, a miracle. A sudden pivot or move that is unexpected. 

In his book, Miracles, Lewis writes that every good general, every good chess player, takes the strength of his opponent's plan and makes it the pivot of his own plan. Just ask Custer. So it is with our Lord Jesus Christ, our Bobby Fischer of the grave and our General Patton over sin, death, and the devil. Jesus is the Supreme Commander of angels, archangels and all the hosts of heaven, defeating death by death and bringing light and life to immortality through his Gospel. Consider the following selection from Lewis on the Grand Miracle that leads to Good Friday that leads to the Great Eucatastrophe:

It ought to be noticed at this stage that the Christian doctrine, if accepted, involves a particular view of Death. There are two attitudes towards Death which the human mind naturally adopts. One is the lofty view, which reached its greatest intensity among the Stoics, that Death 'doesn't matter', that it is 'kind nature's signal for retreat', and that we ought to regard it with indifference. The other is the 'natural' point of view, implicit in nearly all private conversations on the subject, and in much modern thought about the survival of the human species, that Death is the greatest of all evils: Hobbes is perhaps the only philosopher who erected a system on this basis. The first idea simply negates, the second simply affirms, our instinct for self-preservation; neither throws any new light on Nature, and Christianity countenances neither. Its doctrine is subtler. On the one hand Death is the triumph of Satan, the punishment of the fall, and the last enemy. Christ shed tears at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane: the Life of Lives that was in Him detested this penal obscenity not less than we do, but more. On the other hand, only he who loses his life will save it.  We are baptized into the death of Christ, and it is the remedy for the fall. Death is, in fact, what some modern people call 'ambivalent'. It is Satan's great weapon and also God's great weapon: it is holy and unholy; our supreme disgrace and our only hope; the thing Christ came to conquer and the means by which He conquered. (Miracles).

This Holy Week as you journey to Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday, spend time traveling the road that our Lord has trodden for you.